The San Diego Artist Services project @ The Frame Maker & ArtWalk

The Frame Maker signed on as Event Sponsor to this year’s 25th annual ArtWalk in Little Italy for a variety of reasons, but one of the most important was to find a way to give back some business wisdom & insight to emerging members of the San Diego art community.

All six of the artists working at The Frame Maker right now agree that practical business & marketing skills are nowhere to be found in the curriculum of any art school program, so very few people enter the professional art world with a clue as to how it works, what to expect, and most importantly, what tools & strategies emerging artists have available to make the kind of career they (and their audience) want to see happen. (Five of the six artists went to an art school or through an art program.)

Under the guidance of programming director John Hiemstra, The Frame Maker is now pleased to host San Diego Artist Services, an access point for professional visual artists to the best and most complete range of San Diego’s professional art services.

Five San Diego small businesses working together now provide a prepared, informed, and expert service network for professional artists. With an emphasis on consistent, timeless presentation and marketing strategies based on high production values and modern technologies, San Diego Artist Services covers all the bases:

• Artist branding, identity, and niche market identification
• Consistent graphic identity
• Online portfolios and marketing strategies
• Digital imaging for archive and print reproduction
• Advanced modern printing technologies for fine art, print collateral
• Full range of custom framing, mounting and presentation options
• Professional shipping, crating, delivery and installation of all kinds of artwork
• Trade show/ art fair presentation, booth design, graphics, strategies

We’ll be putting up posts specific to all of the contributors over the next few weeks, but the first full fruition of the project will be on full display this coming weekend in San Diego’s Little Italy for ArtWalk. Come down and see two shows suggesting the potential of the collaborative effort, one a show of experimental digital printing by The Frame Maker artists, the second our new “Business of Art” scholarship program in collaboration with John and ArtWalk director Sandi Cottrell.

The Frame Maker booth will be fun, too, so come visit us this Saturday and Sunday at Fir and India in Little Italy across from the fountain at Piazza Basilone.

Posted in ArtWalk in Little italy | No Comments »

The Frame Maker at ArtWalk

Even though this is a traditionally slow time of year for sales and new jobs, The Frame Maker is busy working on a variety of projects right now including our Event Sponsor booth at ArtWalk two weekends form now in Little Italy.

With the technology and assistance of our new friends at Moebius Color, we are creating, not just a cool booth, but a show of new fine art prints by San Diego artists, which unveils our new artist services program The Frame Maker has developed with Programming Director John Hiemstra.

The prints we will display at ArtWalk are part of a somewhat larger show, “Artists Proof”, that continues through May 30 in The Frame Maker showroom in the Mission Hills/Little Italy section of San Diego.

This show explores the possibilities of fine art digital printing (powered by Moebius) combined with state of the art reproduction photography by Mike Brown, utilized for the first time by five San Diego artists working in paint and traditional printmaking techniques, who also work at The Frame Maker.

We will post more about these events with pics, and also more about our new artist services program, as we progress, but be sure to plan and come down to ArtWalk and see the combined work of The Frame Maker staff, Moebius, Mike Brown, and our Business of Art Scholarship winner Jessica Siemens at booths #768 & #769, across from the Piazza Basilone fountain on Fir Street at India

Posted in ArtWalk in Little italy, Community Events | No Comments »

Animalkind Lecture Series: Ernest Silva at SDSU School of Art this week

Ernest Silva at San Diego State University – Thursday, April 16 at 4:00 p.m.

Visiting artist Ernest Silva will present an illustrated lecture on Thursday, April 16 at 4:00 p.m. in Room 412 of SDSU’s School of Art, Design and Art History in conjunction with the exhibition animalkind. The lecture and exhibition are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC. The exhibition continues at the Gallery through May 6.

About the Artist Since the early-1970s, Ernest Silva’s work has been exhibited in over 45 solo exhibitions across the United States and Europe. He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Made in California at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Silva has been a professor of art at the University of California, San Diego since 1979. In addition to his career as an artist and educator, Silva is responsible for co-creating the bi-national project InSite, which has comprised commissioned artworks exhibited throughout the San Diego and Tijuana regions since its inception in 1992. Silva’s work was first seen at the University Art Gallery in 1978 in the exhibition Drawing: Personal Definitions. It is a pleasure to welcome him and his work back to San Diego State University for animalkind.

About the Work Four of Ernest Silva’s paintings are included in “animalkind.” In one of these, a solitary buck seems alarmingly unaware of the devastation that surrounds him. He stands calmly at the edge of a stream flanked by a leafless forest filled with large stumps and severed trees, oblivious to the potential dangers inherent in the lack of sylvan cover and the loss of habitat. Nor does he notice that the entire landscape-sky, water and shore-appears either punctured by bleeding bullet holes or polluted with pools of dripping black oil. The unseen perpetrator of the destruction is the human species, which, according to Silva’s painting, has painted a symbolic bull’s eye on both the deer and nature as a whole. At the same time, the central isolated figure in this and other of Silva’s deer paintings acts as a metaphor for the human condition, especially the state of being vulnerable and alone.

Image: Ernest Silva, “Between Two Shadows, Deer on a Raft,” 2001; oil on canvas, 31 x 39 inches; courtesy of the artist

Posted in Art events in San Diego | No Comments »

The Frame Maker: 2009 Event Sponsor for Mission Federal ArtWalk

In the 25th anniversary year of ArtWalk, San Diego’s premier outdoor art fair and one of the largest of its kind on the west coast, The Frame Maker is proud to lend a hand in keeping this event vibrant and alive as a supporting Event Sponsor.

In addition to sponsoring the event with some of the needed cash for tents, permits, printing and other details, TFM Programming Director John Hiemstra has taken the initiative with ArtWalk Director Sandi Cottrell to create “The Business of Art Scholarship”, a program designed to take a student from the San Diego State Art Department through the trajectory of participating in the ArtWalk experience while building the basic set of marketing tools that all artists need in general: a clear identity, conmsistent branding, print collateral for the weekend itself, and an evolving web presence to both build and communicate with her audience.

The first recipient of this scholarship is Jessica Siemens, finishing her junior year in the SDSU drawing & painting program. This is her painting “Face”, which won the Provost’s purchase award this spring as well as helping Jessica be selected for the “Business of Art” scholarship.

This painting is now part of the San Diego State University permanent collection, but will be on display at Mission Federal ArtWalk in San Diego’s Little Italy the weekend of April 25 & 26, 2009. Come down and see Jessica’s phenomenal work in person, and fins out more about San Diego Artist Services, a new program sponsored by The Frame Maker making its debut with Jessica at ArtWalk (and in these posts!) this April as well.

Posted in ArtWalk in Little italy | 1 Comment »

Jim Brown: The Third Country opens this Thursday April 2

Jim Brown: The Third Country/El Tercer Pais
April 3-May 9
Reception THURSDAY, April 2, 6:30-8:30 PM

Jim Brown is the co-owner, together with James Gates, of Public Architecture and Planning in University Heights. The Third Country/El Tercer Pais will be the first installment of a three-part exhibition. The second part will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in May. The third part will open in late fall of 2009, in a location not yet chosen. Taken together, the work will describe a series of studies about and around the border between Tijuana and San Diego.

Jim tells us that the Athenaeum portion “will be highly explorative in nature. It will be intuitive and non-site-specific. I will examine, through models and drawings, the nature of boundary, and explore linear patterns that might later translate into new strategies of designing the frontier.” Each exploration will take the form of a small model accompanied by a drawing.

Posted in Art events in San Diego | No Comments »